Silica Interview – Bohemia’s RTS/FPS Hybrid Nears 1.0

The Focus of This Interview

Silica is a hybrid of RTS and FPS that began as one person’s vision and is now evolving with the help of Bohemia Interactive’s Incubator. At Gamescom 2025 I spoke with David Šimek (Game Designer) and Vojtěch Matouš (Programmer) about how the project is shaping up in Early Access and what lies ahead.

Indie developers are the lifeblood of this industry. They work unbound by corporate handbooks, unrestricted by quarterly forecasts, and often daring enough to chase ideas others would dismiss as too wild. Their projects may start small — fragile prototypes, rough mechanics — but when given space to grow, they can turn into experiences that reshape entire genres. Silica is a prime example of how brave ideas and developer dreams, amplified by the support of industry veterans, can nourish something truly new.

From One Developer’s Dream to Bohemia’s Incubator

Silica began not as a studio project but as the vision of a single developer, Martin “Dram” Melichárek. Obsessed with the classic feel of old-school real-time strategies like Dune II, he set out to answer a question many players have asked since the 90s: what if you could step inside the battlefield you were commanding from above? For years he carried that idea alone, quietly building systems, experimenting with hybrid gameplay, and shaping a desert planet called Baltarus that would become the heart of his creation.

And I could totally understand that dream. I can’t call myself a huge RTS fan (surprisingly, given my obsession with game spreadsheets) but since childhood I’ve had two favorites: Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2. They fascinated me because you weren’t just a distant dungeon master; you could slip into the skin of your minions, play from a first-person view, and manage the chaos in those narrow dungeon corridors. So when I saw Silica’s trailer, the reaction was instant: this is exactly the kind of hybrid I’ve been waiting for.

This fragile dream might have remained a one-man experiment if not for the support of Bohemia Interactive’s Incubator program. Designed to give independent projects resources and visibility, the Incubator became Silica’s lifeline. The solo project grew into a ten-person team, with new roles filling out around Melichárek’s original design. Financing, QA, and marketing support arrived as well — crucial pieces that most indie teams struggle to secure on their own.

And I have to pause here for a personal note: what Bohemia is doing with the Incubator runs against the typical behavior of big publishers. Instead of absorbing small projects into a rigid corporate framework, they provide stability, experience, and resources so that developers can actually grow. That’s honorable. Despite being known primarily for hardcore mil-sims like Arma (you can check my Arma: Reforger interview to see how team creates authenticity and realism to their game), the studio is deliberately broadening its portfolio and helping diversity flourish in the industry. Take Cosmo Tales (I have a full interview here) or Everwind as examples — bold, different, and backed by a company that isn’t afraid to experiment. Kudos for that stance.

“It was made by a single developer and then entered Bohemia Incubator… now it’s a flagship project,” recalls David Šimek. That shift from lone passion to structured team is part of what makes Silica special. It didn’t start with a publisher mandate or a committee of producers; it started with one developer chasing the memory of the games that inspired him as a teenager.

And yet, joining Bohemia didn’t erase the indie DNA. The team still treats the game like a living experiment, where rough edges are part of the process and direct community dialogue on Discord is encouraged.

The result is a rare balance. Silica carries the soul of a garage project — quirky ideas, personal stakes, and raw ambition — while also enjoying the stability and reach of a veteran publisher. That duality is what defines the game today: a project born of obsession, but nurtured by an ecosystem that lets it grow into something bigger than one developer could have managed alone.

A Tribute to RTS Classics, with FPS in the Mix

When you talk with the Silica team, one theme repeats: this project is both a love letter to real-time strategy and an attempt to break its boundaries. The DNA is obvious. Dune II, the “mother of all RTS”, is etched into the design, from harvesters to factional asymmetry. StarCraft and Warcraft echo in the match-based structure. Even Natural Selection 2 and Battlezone make appearances on their influence list — the rare hybrids that tried, in different ways, to stitch together top-down strategy and boots-on-the-ground action.

But Silica doesn’t want to be a museum of references. The challenge is balance. “Either it’s good FPS and bad RTS, or good RTS and bad FPS,” said David. “We are trying to make them equally important.” That statement carries weight, because it addresses the core fear of hybrid games: that one side always feels like a gimmick.

The team’s solution is freedom. At any moment you can jump from commander view into the body of a soldier, pilot a tank, or even take control of an alien creature. Or you can ignore strategy altogether and let the AI handle the bigger picture while you focus on firefights. The point isn’t to force players into one role but to let them shift as the battle demands. “You can jump into any of your units at any time… or skip commanding altogether and just be a soldier,” Šimek explained.

And here’s my own take: the real magic of Silica is not just in switching between perspectives — it’s in the non-scripted scale of the battles. In most shooters, the dozens of NPCs around you are essentially stage props. They exist to sell the fantasy of a desperate last stand or epic push, but if you stop and watch, you’ll realize nothing is actually decided by them. They trade fire for show, not for outcome. In Silica, every bullet and every explosion is calculated. Damage is real, positioning matters, tactics decide survival. You can idle at the edge of a battlefield and the war will still unfold without you. Or you can throw yourself into the thick of it — tanks rumbling beside you, alien swarms pushing back — and know the results aren’t scripted for your benefit. This, in my view, is Silica’s single biggest feature: a battlefield that doesn’t wait for the player to trigger the next set piece, but one that truly lives and dies by its own rules.

In Silica, every bullet and every explosion is calculated. Damage is real, positioning matters, tactics decide survival.

That flexibility taps into a very specific fantasy. Every RTS player has looked at a single unit — a Space Marine, an Orc grunt, a Zergling — and wondered what it would be like to actually play that character. Silica turns that daydream into its central mechanic. Whether it succeeds fully in balancing both halves remains to be seen, but the ambition alone places it alongside the most daring experiments of the genre.

Boots on the Ground or Eyes in the Sky

Silica’s headline promise is freedom — the ability to step into any role on the battlefield. But the reality is more nuanced, and the nuances are what make the game interesting.

From the commander’s chair, everything is fair game. You can zoom out, manage structures, and then instantly drop into any allied unit to see the fight up close. But once you’re on the ground, the rules change depending on who you are.

Humans live by their hardware. A soldier’s body is fixed, and if you want to change it, you either die and respawn or return to base to swap loadouts. The payoff is access to tanks, hoverbikes, gunships, and all the machinery of modern war. Vehicles are their edge, and the experience of being human is about leveraging firepower and logistics.

Aliens, on the other hand, bend the rules. They fight through a hive-mind, and as an individual drone or beast you’re never trapped. If the body you’re inhabiting is cornered, you can simply leap into another nearby creature. Lose one shell, pick another. It’s an eerie kind of continuity, and it makes the alien perspective fundamentally different: less about gear, more about swarming presence.

That asymmetry changes how “boots on the ground” actually feels. As a human, you’re fragile and replaceable, but also capable of piloting machines that turn the tide. As an alien, you’re never entirely gone — just shifting consciousness from claw to claw until the swarm is spent. The result is two philosophies of war built into the same system, both valid, both distinct.

And this is where Silica’s hybrid nature clicks. The freedom to impersonate any unit is not a gimmick; it’s a mirror of faction identity. Humans must commit, aliens adapt. One side leans on vehicles and planning, the other on raw numbers and hive logic. The same battlefield can feel radically different depending on which pair of eyes you’re looking through.

The Scale Problem — And Why Insignificance Matters

One of the hardest balances Silica has to strike is scale. Each side can field up to a hundred units, which means any one soldier risks being lost in the noise. For a traditional RTS, that’s normal — units are expendable. But in a game where you can embody those units, the question becomes thornier: how do you make a single player feel relevant without turning them into a one-man army?

“It’s quite difficult,” admitted Vojtěch Matouš. “You should not make the player overpowered, but at the same time you need to make them feel like they can cause damage, they can be relevant.” That tension cuts to the core of Silica’s design. Infantry die quickly, just as they would in a real battle, yet players still need to feel their actions matter.

David Šimek argued that this fragility is part of the point: “There is something immersive about being insignificant… just a little guy in a dangerous war machine.” That sense of scale — being one fragile body on a battlefield dominated by harvesters, tanks, and alien monstrosities — creates an intensity that scripted shooters rarely match.

Essentially, this is one of the game’s biggest challenges. A player should absolutely feel like just one cog in the war machine — but also a crucial one. The balance comes not only from stats and mechanics, but from strategic decisions: when is it smarter to leave the grand battle on autopilot and when is it worth stepping in personally? Do you line up a sniper shot on fragile high-value targets, or join your squad in focus-firing a behemoth’s weak spot? I need more time to test these dynamics myself, but the good news is that both the developers and their community are well aware of the issue, and Early Access gives them space and data to tune it.

We’ll get to the community’s role in a moment. But first, let’s look at how Silica approaches the design of its worlds and maps — because variety in environments is just as critical as balance in combat.

Bread and Butter of the Battlefield

For all the ambition behind Silica’s hybrid design, the fundamentals matter just as much. The game currently features three asymmetrical factions — two human and one alien — with 15–20 units and around 10 structures each, adding up to nearly 50 unique unit types across the roster. Matches unfold across 10 massive maps, ranging in size from 3×3 kilometers up to 6×6 kilometers, spread over multiple planets with their own biomes. In mid-game, a single commander might be responsible for around 100+ units at once, pushing the limits of what strategy and control can handle.

After spending time in the game myself, one element stood out immediately: the terrain isn’t flat or decorative. It plays a major role in shaping tactics. High ground offers natural advantages for defense, valleys turn into choke points, and massive rock formations provide genuine cover from long-range fire. Unlike most RTS titles, positioning isn’t simply about where to build — it’s about exploiting the land itself.

This makes Silica feel closer to a battlefield simulation than a scripted RTS map. And terrain is only part of it — the way environments change across planets and biomes is just as important, which brings us to the question of map diversity.

Designing Worlds Beyond the Sand

If Silica’s battles are about scale, its maps are about variety. The desert planet of Baltarus sets the stage, but there’s only so much you can do with endless sand. After a dozen maps of dunes and dust, even alien crystals and giant burrows start to blur together. The developers quickly realized they needed more than just color filters to keep players engaged.

That push for diversity led to experiments with snow, crystal caves, and even entirely different planets. “After ten sand maps it’s hard to find original ideas… so we broke the palette with snow and alien crystal caves,” explained the team. Swapping sand for snow might sound trivial, but in play it changes the atmosphere dramatically — different lighting, different soundscape, a fresh sense of place. The red volcanic map of Crimson Peak pushes even further, draping battlefields in gloom and giving matches a very different rhythm.

Not all ideas translate perfectly. Underground maps, for example, proved problematic for RTS play because commanders couldn’t see their units in caves. Still, the experiments show how determined the team is to avoid monotony. Inspiration comes from literature as well — references to Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth surfaced during our talk, echoing the desire to make exploration feel like more than just another skirmish on sand.

And it’s true: many otherwise good games struggle simply because of a lack of map diversity. To keep people engaged for dozens of hours, you need more biomes and varied terrain, period. 

Now, let’s talk about the community directly, because their role in shaping Silica has gone far beyond suggestions on Discord.

From Feedback to Features

Silica is being built in conversation with its players. The developers are active on Discord, polling the community, sharing early ideas, and even debating balance changes in real time. “We are doing polls on the Discord, and we are asking the community what they think about it, what they want,” explained the team. That feedback loop has become one of Silica’s defining features.

The community also pushed beyond feedback and started creating their own content. The best example is a fan-made survival mode, inspired by Helldivers. It began as one player hosting matches and narrating them like a game master, with dozens of others joining in. Rough and dependent entirely on one host’s schedule, it nonetheless showed how far players were willing to push Silica’s systems.

The developers responded by placing user-generated content on the roadmap, with tools planned for mission design and curated multiplayer scenarios. In time, players will be able to create their own campaigns, cutscenes, and dynamic events — not unlike Arma’s legendary editor. That’s a direct reaction to what the community proved possible without official support.

From my perspective, this is the healthiest sign of growth. Early Access can be a trap if developers use it as a shield, but here it’s being treated as a laboratory — ideas tested, refined, and sometimes outright invented by the people playing. And as I said earlier, the game’s balance challenges are very real. Having thousands of active players feeding data and experimenting with modes is exactly what Silica needs to crystallize into its final shape.

Looking Toward 1.0 and Beyond

Early Access has been both a proving ground and a challenge for Silica. The developers are clear that they don’t want to linger there forever, but they also refuse to ship until the game reaches the quality bar they’ve set internally. “The game is never done, it’s only released,” they admitted. According to the team, the scope for version 1.0 is already defined and the plan is to finalize it in the following months rather than years.

Silica 1.0 will launch in the following months.

That’s the closest thing to a release date for Silica at this stage — not a fixed day on the calendar, but a commitment to bring Early Access to a close once the promised features are in place.

What’s certain is the direction. The team outlined three major additions coming as the game approaches version 1.0. First is a full single-player campaign in the form of a planetary conquest, letting players fight for territory as any of the three factions while advancing through tech levels. Second is the Creative Sandbox — tools for building missions, scenarios, and even cutscenes, with Steam Workshop integration for sharing. And third, Silica is planned for PlayStation 5, complete with controller support, expanding its reach beyond the PC audience.

These are ambitious steps, but they fit the project’s trajectory. Silica started as one person’s idea, grew into a small team under Bohemia’s Incubator, and has since become a collaborative experiment shaped by thousands of players. The road to 1.0 is about more than polishing code; it’s about ensuring the game delivers on its core promise — a genuine fusion of RTS and FPS where every shot, every order, and every tactical choice matters.

Thoughts on Silica’s Future

Silica shows how the RTS/FPS mix can work when both halves are treated seriously. For players who grew up with Dune II, it will feel familiar, especially with the renewed interest in the Dune universe through recent games and films. At the same time, Silica carries its own sci-fi identity, with distinct factions and lore. While exploring on a dust buggy in first-person view, I ran into a hostile worm-like creature that wasn’t tied to any faction. It felt more like an easter egg — a subtle nod that shows the team’s affection for the games they grew up with.

Bohemia’s Incubator program gives small projects the resources to grow while allowing them to keep their own identity. Besides, in the interview, David and Vojtěch described how community feedback is already influencing survival modes, maps, and balance — evidence that the process is active. Still, there’s always a risk: following every request too closely can blur the original vision. Finding the balance between listening and leading is part of the challenge.

In my opinion, the main limitation isn’t ambition but time. A team of ten is already ten times larger than the original one-man effort, but reaching 1.0 release with the quality players expect will inevitably involve compromises. That doesn’t make the project weaker — it simply shapes the pace of progress.

This is where community interest plays a role. Wishlists and early purchases not only motivate the team but also help secure the support needed to keep development moving. At the moment, Silica is discounted until October 6 for $15.99 — 20% off the standard $19.99. For the scale of content already in place, the price feels fair, and players also gain the rare chance to influence how the game evolves through Early Access.

Silica began as one developer’s idea and is now a collaborative project with growing momentum. With steady support, it can move beyond being a niche experiment and mature into a distinctive entry in the strategy and shooter space — a reminder that when ideas are backed by both community and industry, they can find a way forward.